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InvisibleBlack -> RE: A Valid Critisism of Obama? (12/5/2009 12:10:56 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SpinnerofTales
While I respect his information gathering and trying to bring sides together, I have to admit to a feeling that it is time to fish or cut bait that is rapidly turning into one of it being time for him to shit or get off the pot.
To be fair, Barack Obama is a guy in his forties with a degree in law from Harvard and some experience in politicking in Chicago. He is not a military genius nor does he have any military expertise. He is not an economics or financial wizard and, in fact, knew next to nothing about economics when he was running for office - I expect he's gotten a few crash courses in it by now. Personally, I think he's in over his head and he knows it. Issues like the Israeli-Palestine conflict or "stabilizing" Afghanistan or resolving the utter collapse of the core of the banking system are problems that experts and geniuses have been wrestling with for generations. It's unrealistic to expect President Obama to have an answer to these problems.
My own opinion is that when he threw his hat in the ring for the office, his "Hope & Change" message was sincere, but his view of "Hope & Change" had to deal with racial conflict and social inequity in this country - he may well have been the perfect President to address matters of race in the United States. Unfortunately for him, by the time the Presidential campaign was well under way and it was too late to change the direction of the runaway Obama express, the bottom fell out of the global economy and it turned out that rather than "winding down" as it appeared to be under Bush, the conflicts in the Middle East were merely simmering and were unresolved.
So now you have a Harvard lawyer in a role where you need a statesman, general and economist. I fully understand his seeking advice from the "best and brightest" in the hopes that solutions would rise to the surface. The problem here, as I see it, is that he is not surrounded by the "best and brightest" but by a coterie of Washington insiders and political hacks - the Bush war machine, Clinton administration re-treads, and Wall Street insiders - none of whom have any good answers. If they ever did, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.
You're never going to get "consensus" over any serious issue. This is why whenever I hear someone claim the consensus of economists or scientists or whatever agree on something, I know they're blowing smoke up my ass. As opposed to Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" view of a Utopia if only you got the creative geniuses together, the fact is if you put 100 geniuses who are experts on a given subject in a room to discuss an issue, you won't get harmony and an answer, you're more likely to get fistfights.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. The right answers to these problems, even if we knew what they were, would make a lot of people unhappy when you suggested them, more unhappy when you rammed them through over opposition, and would only be "obvious" and "brilliant" in retrospect. I expect we're going to see a lot more discussion, a lot more rhetoric, and a lot more thrashing around without committing all-out to a given solution - and along the way more and more people are going to become dissatisfied with the way things are going.
I see a lot of trouble ahead.
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